Movies: Past, present and future

"He's Just Not That Into You" started it last year, and now "Valentine's Day" is upping the ante: Throw into one romantic comedy actors who appeal to as many constituencies as possible and watch the audience come out in droves.

At least that's the hope for "Valentine's Day," the Garry Marshall confection that takes actors from pretty much every age, creed and background and tosses them into one crock pot of a marketing casserole.

Latinos (George Lopez), blacks (Jamie Foxx), frat boys (Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Ashton Kutcher), older women (Patrick Dempsey), the "Hangover" crowd (Bradley Cooper) and demos heretofore not thought of (not to mention those who like seeing actual movie stars such as Anne Hathaway and Julia Roberts) all will find a face with which to identify in this ensemble story of love and loss (or just love and love) set to open this weekend.

It's not so much that there's casting diversity in the film -- though from the sheer volume of names one wonders if studio execs were ticking boxes as much as scrutinizing sizzle reels -- but how that diversity is being flogged. If you live anywhere within radius of a major metropolitan city, you've seen the faces on the sides of every bus and billboard. Call it kitchen-sink marketing, or marketing as imagined by the U.S. Census Bureau. It's kind of cynical and, we have to admit, kind of brilliant. Throw as many faces at the wall as you can and some contingent, somewhere will come out to see them. ("Love, Actually," another ensemble piece and a film to which this movie has been compared, pulls of the vignette approach with a far more
coherent and less gimmicky cast.)

But for all the groups that the "Valentine's Day" stars (presumably) bring in, the real prize is tween girls, a demographic that the film grabs with with the coupling of Taylor Lautner and Taylor Swift (more on the latter below), whose appearance in the film is fleeting but whose demographic value is incalculable.